I've just got a VPS that came with Fedora Core 5 installed. Is there any benefit to upgrading it to Fedora 10?

Yes. Fedora 5 is no longer supported. In fact Fedora 8 is no longer supported.

Fedora is bleeding edge with most releases being replaced within a year.

What does that mean for me, in terms of material benefits? Treat me like a noob here .. :-)

Generally the most important impact is that you won't be getting things like security updates.

Beyond that, you may have trouble installing some programs because they may require newer libraries to execute properly.

Here's an example:
Say you try to install Foo 3.0 and it relies on Bar 1.4. When Fedora 5 was around it was only Foo 1.7 and depended on Bar 1.2. So you try to install the new Bar 1.4 but it depends on Oingo 10.4, but in Fedora 5 it was only Oingo 6.6. You get into this "dependency hell" because each program might rely on another program that also needs updating. By using a newer distro, you likely have the correct dependencies (or can get them).

I run Debian stable because I don't like to upgrade but every couple of years and I can't handle the breakage (wife would kill me) of running bleeding edge stuff. So I get security updates for several years, but the cost is my applications age. Then every couple years, Debian releases again and I upgrade. RHEL/CentOS are the Red Hat equivalent of Debian stable. Things stay the same for a long time but you get security fixes during that time at the cost of waiting for upgraded applications.

So for Red Hat, if you don't mind upgrading more frequently and/or want to have the latest and greatest stuff (although slightly buggy) then you want the newest Fedora (or Ubuntu/Mint/Debian testing or unstable/whatever-distro-you-like) you can get your hands on. But either way, I'd upgrade from Fedora 5 since you don't get the security fixes...

Note also that I have often found that upgrading can cause more problems than it solves. Sometimes, a newer version has newer libraries, a newer compiler, etc. that -will- be incompatible with existing package you may need, that worked just fine on your older version.

If you have a favourite package or application you use in your current version, chances are you might have problems getting it compiled or installed under the new version of, for example, Fedora. This happened to me with quite a lot of applications I used to enjoy in FC6 - I jumped to FC10, and many of them simply stopped working - I could not compile them, the GCC in FC 10 was finicky about C++ syntax, etc. I had to download newer versions of most of the source packages as well, recompile them, etc.

However, for Audacity, for example, I'm finding it simply impossible to get it to compile under FC 10 - the FLAC libraries it depends on have invalid C++ syntax (according to FC 10's GCC) - and ALL versions of FLAC I can find, all give the same problem in the same place with FC 10's GCC.

So my advice is, if you use Fedora or any other distro in a desktop environment (i. e. where security is not really critical or a big issue) - CAREFULLY consider why you might want to upgrade. In a network / server environment, sure, you'll probably crave the newest security patches or updates. But for a desktop type setting? Nah.

Right but if you don't plan on doing upgrades frequently you should not be using Fedora because of its short life cycle and bleeding edge nature.

Fedora is used to test much of what ends up in RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) but RHEL has a much longer life cycle. If you're using it for commercial reasons and support is important you should use RHEL.
If it is non-commercial you should look at using CentOS which is a binary compile of sources from RHEL.

Thanks for your help guys - I appreciate it.

Unfortunately I don't really have a choice of which OS to use, and I'm stuck with Fedora. I'm quite surprised Fedora is used, but the only way I seem to be able to upgrade is using yum.

When I say it is "not supported" I mean that there are no yum repositories for it any longer. Fedora project basically only keeps repositories around for the current release and the one just before it.

You can find some rpms for it at Dag Weirs' site and of course can try to compile your own from sources but it becomes quite cumbersome compared to using a community supported distro like CentOS or Ubuntu or vendor supported like RHEL or Suse.

Yeah, that took me a while to figure out. The VPS didn't come with yum installed. The only version of yum I could get installed was 2.0.x which uses the header.info files. There was no way to get 2.1 or above installed (I was running into dependency hell). I eventually figured out (kinda by accident) that I could create the missing header.info file using yum-arch, creating a mirror of the repos on the server, and configuring yum to use the local mirror with the header.info file. Yum now works fine ...

I'm guessing I'll have to do FC5->6->7->8->9->10 in sequence.

This is a fun experiment, and coming from 10 years of MS I've got a steep learning curve!

Why not just install Fedora 10 fresh?

The problem with upgrades is they tend to leave things there from prior version that you're never really sure whether you can delete. With a fresh install the only thing there is what came with the new version.

There's no way to do that with Plesk/Virtuozzo. Virtuozzo does some strange things (for example, there's no hard disk listed in /dev). Apparently according to the Virtuozzo documentation, it saves disk space by using a differentiating file system (so the underlying OS is FC5 too) and it depends on that; only files I change are stored in the virtual disk (however that's set up ... I still don't understand how Virtuozzo works yet, so who knows how it's doing what it's doing). That's why an in place upgrade seems like the only option.

Didn't you pay for Virtuozzo? If so you might want to call them to find out what OS you can run. If you can't do fresh install I'm not sure you can do upgrade either. In fact the Fedora "upgrade" from version to version is not officially supported by the Fedora project though they have links to what others say they have done.

I didn't pay for Virtuozzo, because it comes included with the VPS I'm renting from my host. I know F10 is supported by Virtuozzo however, my web host doesn't want to upgrade from FC5.

I don't yet know whether the upgrade will work, but hey, I might as well try, right? If other people say they've done it, I'm at least going to experiment and see what I can do. I'll let you know how it works out in an hour or so, if I'm successful.

I did manage to upgrade from FC5 to FC6, but I'm not able to go further than that. The only reason I can't go further is Plesk is installed and kicks up a fuss with dependency issues and conflicts. I could remove Plesk, but that could have adverse affects because I might not be able to access Virtuozzo to restore my virtualized VPS if there are issues later on; I don't want to call my host to explain to them what I've done ;-)

Yum upgrades are possible even beyond FC6. I actually managed the upgrade up to FC8, and it should work up to FC10 as well. You need to take care that some URL's in older repo files are not served anymore, but otherwise all FC versions are available on the net. Sometimes tweaking is required, but that also happens when upgrading only one version level.

After a hard disk crash I had to replace FC8 on a PC and installed a brand new FC10 - the speed and quality improvement was surprising, though only the hard disk has changed in the configuration.

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